A close ally of President Ahmadinejad has accused 44 leading members of the Iran’s old guard of corruption, among them several prominent ayatollahs.

The unprecedented accusations are seen as a daring challenge to Iran’s ruling establishment by the intensely ambitious president as he strives to secure more power for himself and his office.

The incendiary “disclosures” were made by Abbas Palizar, a member of a parliamentary investigative committee into corruption. In a speech to students at Hamedan University in western Iran this month, he denounced the country’s judiciary as the “centre of economic corruption”, according to reports from Tehran.

Some Iranian newspapers have touched on the scandal without naming names but it is receiving far wider coverage on Iranian news websites. A video of Mr Palizar’s speech, in which he identified allegedly corrupt officials and clerics, has been posted on the internet by Hamedan University students .

He accused many of the President’s opponents in the conservative camp, some of them Mr Ahmadinejad’s former allies, of exploiting the country’s wealth for their own benefit. Mr Palizar said that Iran’s natural resources, such as timber in the Caspian region, had been plundered, and factories sold off at bargain-basement prices to regime insiders. He also alleged that judges and influential organisations had acquired hundreds of new, Iranian-made cars at knock-down prices.

Mr Palizar told of a senior cleric who won government support to found a hospital to take care of his disabled son and then allegedly secured four very profitable mining concessions to finance the venture.

Whether true or not, most Iranians are likely to believe the corruption allegations, which will put Mr Ahmadinejad’s rivals on the defensive.

Some analysts see the allegations as an implicit challenge to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. Others believe Mr Ahmadinejad would not dare embarrass Ayatollah Khamenei, who they suspect has allowed the debate to go public in order to play rival wings in the conservative camp against each other.

When Mr Ahmadinejad, the son of a humble blacksmith, ran for the presidency three years ago, he portrayed himself as an incorruptible man of the common people. He posed as a Robin Hood-figure who would tackle cronyism, corruption and nepotism and give the poor a fairer share of Iran’s oil wealth.

He is reviving that challenge to the old elite and its vested interests now as his conservative rivals attack his mishandling of the economy: inflation and unemployment are soaring.

Professor Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University in New York, said that commentators were mistakenly writing off Mr Ahmadinejad in next year’s presidential elections. “He is a ferocious competitor, an edgy populist who wins the hearts of his lumpenproletariat countrymen even while he is demolishing the economy, and a supremely ambitious politician who is a threat to the entire post-revolutionary establishment,” Prof Sick told The Times.

Mr Palizar told of another ayatollah who applied to build a law faculty for women in the holy city of Qom and asked for the ownership of a tyre factory to finance it. He allegedly bought the factory at a tiny fraction of its real value and then sold it on the stock market.

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